I literally flew in from Maui (via LA) and hopped on a train to get to Sugarcon on very little sleep. I’ve never attended a Sugarcon evet before but boy am I glad I did. First of all I had the great pleasure of meeting with folks that I have been chatting with online but never met in person such as Paul Greenberg, Dr. Natalie, Bob Thompson, Mitch Lieberman, and Jesus Hoyos. It was also great to see folks such as Sameer Patel, Oliver Marks, Jeremiah Owyang, Andrew Mueller, and others that I have had the pleasure of seeing at various events. I attended some interesting sessions and will highlight the main keypoints of each in an easily digestible bullet pointed list.

Mitch Lieberman: Understanding the social customer:

Social CRM puts a focus on the customer whereas traditional CRM puts a focus on the company

The social customer is all about the power of “me”

Social CRM is the extension of CRM to interact with the social customer. This extension exists by process, culture, and technology.

Customers and their expectations have changed and so did the eco-system this companies must also change. Can’t address customer needs and can’t “focus” on the customer if you don’t adapt with them.

The big challenge is how do you scale trust, authority, and personality? People are the real platform here not anything else

We talk about openness and transparency. Openness is the willingness to share all of the information and impact what people see. Transparency is just about letting people “see”

The goal of becoming a social business is to have a continuous feedback loop of social CRM and Enterprise 2.0

Social business is not about “kumbayah,” it’s more than everyone being friends and holding hands. We’re talking about business here and business hasn’t changed.

Service level agreements need to be seriously revisited. When people have a problem with Comcast they respond within a few minutes when people have an issue with American Airlines they take over a week to respond. The customer expectations of both of these brands are the same but the service level agreements don’t match.

Every successful CRM deployment MUST be backed up by a solid strategy otherwise it will ALWAYS fail.

A PR plan is also important to let the customers know what you are going to do and how you are going to interact/communicate.

Social CRM is still a house of cards, but a stable one. Meaning we are going to keep changing and adapting as we get started, stability doesn’t exist yet and you are never done.

Jeremiah Owyang: How social media is changing customer behavior

We understand psychographics and demographics but now we really need to start focusing on socialgraphics for the social web.

There are 5 key questions that need to be addressed when determining customers’ socialgraphics profiles

Where are your customers online?

What are your customer’s social behaviors online?

What social information or who do your customers rely on?

What is your customers social influence, who trusts them?

How do your customers use social technologies in the context of your products?

Some key issues that companies need to address (brought up by me)

How you respond to customers

When you respond to customers

What channels you use to respond to customers

Customers don’t care what department you’re in, they just want their problems fixed, this means that support is now a marketing/pr issue as well.

The evolution of the web is asynchronous (blogs), real-time (twitter), and then intention driven (plancast).

What do you think of these session highlights, did it give you something to think about? Mitch put this new session track together with a focus on Social CRM and it was very well received with lots of valuable information that was shared. Overall it was a great event and definitely worth attending, really looking forward to day 2, if you can’t attend you can follow along at home with the #scon10 hashtag on twitter.

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Principal of Chess Media Group, a social business consultancy. Jacob works with mid and enterprise organizations on developing customer and employee engagement strategies. He is also the co-author of Twittfaced, a social media 101 book for business. Jacob authors a Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 blog.